World of Warcraft - Cataclysm: Experimental DirectX 11 support

The upcoming WoW Addon Cataclysm has an experimental DirectX 11 path. PC Games Hardware shows you how to enable the dx11 renderer and shows the potential benefits.

WoW Cataclysm (21) [Source: view picture gallery]

If you participate in the beta of World of Warcraft - Cataclysm and if have a DirectX 11-compliant system, you may experience the benefits of DX11 using a modified shortcut.

To do this, expand a shortcut to the woW.exe with "-d3d11". Alternatively, open the "Config.wtf" in "\ World of Warcraft \ Beta \ WTF" and add the line SET gxApi "d3d11" (with quotes). With the experimental DirectX 11 path the visuals changes: Spells now reflect in the water or lava, so do the characters and the sky. However the pretty transitions between water and shore disappear - hopefully, this is just a bug.

Comments (29)

Guess what: Even without tesselation, designers have the possibility, to use a couple of polygons on their modell. More precisely: They could use tons of them without maxing out PCIe2 or current CPUs, so Tesselation does not even prevents bottlenecking. The current limitation ist not getting lots of polygons to the gpu (which could actually profit from DX11 tess - if one uses round objects... otherwise, old DX10 displaycementmapping is the way to go anyhow), but rendering lots of polygons. And Tesselation helps exactly nil here.

Just a couple of high res modells won't get Blizzard a lot of new players. To have up to date graphics, they would have to do a complete new engine, refine the landscapes and effects (both things would cause balancing/compatibility problems if they are optional)..... Essentially they would have to make a WoW2 that accidently uses a similar maplayout and compatible client protocol.Imho your suggestion is not a win-win, but a win-COST situation.

IDX11 isn't an announced feature of Cataclysm yet, and the screenshots are from a beta product. Why is everyone acting like it's shipping like this tomorrow?

Because a beta is supposed to reflect the final product and should only differ in the number of bugs.These screenshots suggest a lack of about 1-2 years of designers work and mind you: As DX11 allows exactly 0 things, that cannot be rendered on DX9 or 10 hardware (though at less performance) or in worst case by a software rednerer, the designers could and should start working on detailed models a long time before the final engine is avaluable. That they haven't done this yet is a very strong hint, that they will never.

On the other hand, I agree:Why is everyone making a fuzz about it? WoW has been locking old since the day it started and anyone, who is still interested in WoW today should have found a lot better reasons to play, then graphics.